Will CIA nominee admit to her torture links?

Gina Haspel may be the next boss of the intelligence agency, despite having been chief of a secret prison in Thailand in 2002 where inmates were tortured, says Tim Weiner.

The Senate confirmation hearing for Gina Haspel to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency will be the last chance for the United States to confront its history of torturing terrorist suspects.

Haspel got cold feet a few days back, as she prepared for her first public appearance representing the CIA. Who wouldn’t? She was contemplating a confession to countenancing violations of the laws of war.

But I suspect that when today’s hearing is done, the record of denial and deception will be largely intact.

No one will be held to account. One of the darker chapters in 21st-century American history will be shoved farther down the memory hole.

The CIA, having acted with impunity and then absolved itself of wrongdoing, now likely will be led by Haspel, who both oversaw brutal interrogations at a CIA prison in Thailand and then drafted an order to destroy 92 video recordings of these and other horrors.

“I’ve said to the people that we don’t torture, and we don’t,” President George W Bush insisted in 2006. But we did.

“Torture works,” Donald J Trump proclaimed in 2016. But it doesn’t. If Haspel isn’t compelled to say otherwise, these lies may someday be seen as truths.

The spy service conned US Congress over the efficacy of torture; CIA’s counterterrorism chiefs held steadfast to the idea that torture worked. It didn’t. The agency’s inspector general found that the torture programme failed to produce significant intelligence.

Those who were tortured, including the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, cannot be prosecuted; the evidence against them is fatally tainted by waterboarding, beatings, and death threats at the point of a handgun and a hand drill.

Nor can the CIA officers who oversaw and conducted torture be brought to trial; Bush granted them all immunity.

The senator uniquely qualified to bear witness against torture is John McCain, the Arizona Republican, who spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

To make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank, he once wrote. It is torture, very exquisite torture.

McCain wrote those words in 2005, in a debate over America’s compliance with the United Nations Convention on Torture. He wrote an amendment into law, banning torture, and it passed, 90-9.

Among those opposed was Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, now the attorney general.

At that time, the horrors of the prison at Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, had come to light. But the full facts regarding the CIA’s black sites for prisoners still were a very dark secret.

Gina Haspel.

And Haspel, with her boss at headquarters, Jose Rodriguez, was trying to make sure they stayed secret.

She drafted an order, sent by her superior, to destroy all videotapes recording torture. Rodriguez wrote, in a memoir, that he reviewed Haspel’s work, then “took a deep breath of weary satisfaction and hit send”.

It was just as George Orwell described the memory holes in the novel, 1984, which were situated throughout the Ministry of Truth, and where history was rewritten to match state propaganda:

When one knew that any document was due for destruction…it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces, which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

The CIA’s destroy order was executed immediately after the Senate proposed an independent commission to investigate the black sites. Into the fiery furnaces went the evidence.

An epic showdown would be certain if McCain, who is fighting brain cancer, were well enough to attend Haspel’s confirmation hearing.

In any event, he already has sent her detailed written questions about the techniques, which, in his words, “compromised our values, stained our national honour, and threatened our historical reputation”.

“Did you advocate for the destruction of tapes or any other material containing potential evidence of the torture of, or the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on, detainees in the custody of, or under the effective control of, the CIA?”

McCain wants to know. “At the time, what were your personal views of the legality, morality, and effectiveness of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’?

What is your assessment, today, of the effectiveness of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and their impact on the United States’ moral standing in the world?”

I would add a few questions of my own for the nominee. President Donald Trump’s first CIA director, Mike Pompeo, now newly sworn in as US secretary of state, said last October that the CIA needed to become a “much more vicious agency” in its covert operations.

Does she agree?

President Bush’s White House lawyers argued that it would be unconstitutional for Congress to outlaw torture if the commander-in-chief said it was needed to protect national security.

If Trump secretly ordered the CIA to resume waterboarding, would she follow that command, in the face of American law and the Geneva Conventions? These questions go to the heart of who and what America now stands for.

Haspel can disavow her past, or embrace it. Her nomination should stand or fall on that point.